CES 32GB SDHC cards too small for you? How about 2TB? That's what the SDXC memory card format is designed to deliver.

Announced today at CES, the XC - for 'eXtended Capacity', but what's wrong with EC? - the format also ups read and write speeds to 104MB/s. The SD Association - the organisation that oversees the SD card standard - said it's looking to up the data-transfer rate to 300MB/s.

The format used Microsoft's exFAT - aka FAT 64 - file system. exFAT was introduced with Windows CE 6.0, and appeared in Vista in Service Pack 1.

The SDXC spec will be published later this quarter, and the SDA implied that existing specificiations, including SDIO and SDHC, would be updated to support the higher data throughput.

There's no word on when SDXC-compatible devices and cards will go on sale. Not until the end of the year, we'd say - and the cards won't be cheap when they do. ®